


Painted Are the Living

by stormae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art to Life, Explicit Language, F/M, Not sure though, death???, it may not count
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 13:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10697805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormae/pseuds/stormae
Summary: It was those same dark eyes and the same curve to the nose and the same dark hair that were still looking at you from the giant canvas leant against the table leg, but now when the figure turned this way and that he revealed angles you hadn’t even thought about yet.





	Painted Are the Living

For you, it truly was as easy as taking air into your lungs—painting. You could sit for hours in relative silence, the only sounds being the intermittent gentle brushes of the bristles on taught canvas, entirely content. Your happy place was not a physical location, but really anywhere with a brush in hand and a sky to paint. You adored painting the sky, or landscapes in general. They never fidgeted or became impatient or shot you disgruntled expressions when you took too long or they didn’t like the way they turned out at your hand.

Actually, that was a lie. Nature was even harder to capture than the human form, you were pretty sure. This was because of its constant changeability. The clouds refused to remain suspended and still until your brush had captured their form, and the breeze often decided to actively impede your process by forcing the flowers or trees to thrash back and forth or send the aforementioned clouds skittering across the sky in a myriad of different directions, the shapes you had been set on painting dissipating forever. It was undoubtably frustrating, as you could not snap back at the wind, remind it that it should obey you if it wished to be captured—immortalised—in oil on canvas. No, the wind manipulated the landscape as it pleased, forcing you to adapt to the temperamental environment. You had to sketch quickly, not doubting your hand as you took down the precise moment that you desired to have forever at your fingertips or on your wall. You were also a firm believer that this mandatory self-assurance had a tendency to spill over into other facets of your life. The only aspect of yourself that knew patience was the hand that held the paintbrush, the rest of you was erratic and perennially living in the moment.

This lifestyle made university, and the rest of you life, constantly challenging. The teachers for most of your subjects detested you for your unending procrastination.

“No,” you’d protest, trying to hand in a paper at the last possible minute, knowing the rushed effort was sub-par at best but you had to pass the class if you wanted to stay in your Arts course, “you see, I watched this really good TED talk about procrastination, and like, there’s this instant gratification monkey, and—”

They rarely let you finish, but if anyone ever did ask you why you habitually condemned yourself to sleepless nights and unhealthy stress levels due to your ‘seize the day!’ attitude, you felt comforted that you had a sufficient answer to at least get them off your back.

The only thing you were inclined to spend your time perfecting was your art. You were more than happy to spend hours adding shading and dimension to something that would have been fine in its original incarnation, but struggled to spend more than ten minutes with a book in hand or a pen to paper or in a conversation without losing interest or feeling the impulse to do something else. Some may dub you unsettled or undependable, you preferred to view yourself through nice, rose tinted lenses. Perhaps exciting or adaptable were nicer words. The perspective through those glasses made living with yourself easier, anyway.

You’d expressed these sentiments to a friend, one day. He’d replied rather dismissively, “But it’s all right to hate yourself.” You had been understandably taken aback. “You’re an artist. You’re meant to be depressed.”

“That’s awful.”

“That’s reality.”

You were dissatisfied with this perceived reality, though. You would much rather feel inspired by the skies of the evenings in autumn, when the sun drenched everything in a beautiful, mellow pink that soothed your perpetually racing mind and calmed you in a way that the oppressive grey of a thundering sky would never be able to manage. You wanted to paint lovely things through a rapturous lens. You also wanted to avoid being so caught up in your own angsty, artistic turmoil that you decided to cut your own ear off. You didn’t want you sanity Van Gogh-ing anywhere, thanks.

And sanity comes from happiness. And essays never equate to happiness.

Maybe, you pondered, this is all my instant gratification monkey, justifying my irrational actions. You banished the idea. If painting was your form of procrastination, then you didn’t mind. It was relaxing, the one thing you felt you were truly good at, the one thing that grasped your attention firmly with both hands and held you captive until a friend had to claw you away from the canvas, reminding you that you need to eat and sleep in order to be able to get up and paint again tomorrow.

Your apartment was cluttered with stacks upon stacks of canvases, all different sizes and shapes, leaned against each other, waiting to absorb a moment into the threads of their surface. Some piles already had colour splattered across them, already a completed image. You didn’t have enough wall space to hang them all, and nobody apart from yourself seemed to have any interest in endless images of clouds, so it wasn’t like you could sell them, thus they remained resting against one another.

You were very good at painting skyscapes, given it was basically all you ever put your mind to. Sometimes you’d draw another snapshot of nature, but whatever you were depicting was always something real, something in front of you, something that you could see.

As your bristles traced their way across a tiny canvas you had set up before you, working diligently to capture each blade of grass in their individual, unique forms from where they peered up at you from outside the classroom window, the heavy ring hanging from a chain around your neck glinted in the sunlight. Your dad had given it to you for your birthday when you were young. He’d received it from his father, and was complaining that the gold didn’t match the silver of his watch and that he never got any use out of it. You seldom took off the family heirloom, a firm believer that it bettered all of your artworks tenfold. When you’d first received it, threading it along a chain to remedy the issue that your fingers were too dainty for the undeniably masculine ring, you’d noticed your talent with a pencil or paintbrush improve. You’d expressed this to your father, but his lack of an affinity with anything artistic had him dismissing you immediately. He hadn’t picked up a coloured pencil since the days he’d spent desperately attempting to colour within the lines.

“Y/N,” your teacher said, yanking one of the white earbuds from your ears and effectively pulling you from your daze of memory. You dropped the paintbrush and looked up at him, a questioning eyebrow raised.

“Sir?”

He placed himself on the stool beside you, gentling picking up the canvas from its perch and observing it in his hands. “Y/N, you’re very talented. I understand that it is comforting to repeat the actions that we know we are good at, but I really think you need to extend yourself beyond what you can see, beyond what’s physically before you.”

“Ok…?”

“I’m challenging you to paint something you don’t have in front of you. You can look up reference images on the computer, but I want you to try to paint from your mind’s eye.”

He didn’t leave much room for discussion, standing before you could respond and moving on to scrutinise the next student along in your row of desks.

Your immediate reaction was to reject the very idea, but you quickly realised what he said was very true. You enjoyed painting skyscapes over and over and over again because you knew you could, knew they’d turn out well, knew the extent of your ability in the field. The idea of painting something insubstantial, something you couldn’t hold and inspect from all angles, had you panicking slightly. You knew a task like this shouldn’t be difficult at all, but its unfamiliarity confronted you with nerves you couldn’t suppress.

It was this immediate trepidation that spurred you to take up the gauntlet that had been laid down in front of you with unbridled determination. You pulled up several reference photos of hydrangeas and peonies on your laptop, deciding that flowers were familiar territory but the particular types in question were not, thus it was an appropriate starting point. After examining several different photos of the two kinds of flower, you closed your laptop and went to sketching. The motions of your wrist were not as intuitive as they may have been, were you outlining the shape of a cluster of cumulonimbus clouds, but it was not as entirely foreign as you had anticipated it to be. The bunch sketched well, and as the class packed up for the day you found yourself incredibly reluctant to go home. You remained in your seat as the rest of the college students departed, your teacher dropping a set of keys on your desk and imploring you to remember to lock up as you left.

You continued to paint as the sun began to descend in the world outside the confines of the art studio, the world descending into your favourite shades of tangerine and rosé as you replicated similar pastel shades with your brush, filling each petal with vibrance and adding shading and highlighting until you were done and the flower looked as if you could reach into the canvas and yank out a real posy.

As you stood from your stool to take a broader look at the little artwork, you were actually rather impressed with yourself. You hadn’t anticipated your first attempt to be so successful. But even you, your own greatest critic, had to concede that the flowers peaking at you from inside in the canvas may as well have been pressed versions of the real thing.

You found your hand instinctually moving upwards to take the heavy ring between your fingers, rolling it back and forth along the chain as you considered the finished image before you. It felt particularly warm in your grasp, but you assumed that was due to its proximity to you skin as you sat in direct sunlight, next to the big windows that ran the length of the room.

Feeling content, you gathered your used brushes, palette and cup of water and went next door to the studio with the little washing station. You took your time cleaning the pigment from the bristles, humming along to the music in your headphones. You didn’t often stay at the studio after classes were finished, but you always loved the time spent there when you did. It was so peaceful and empty but without the eeriness normal classrooms would exude were you to find yourself in them as dusk descended. No, each room was cluttered with art, leaving no room for the unnerving.

After you decided that the brushes and palette were sufficiently clean and your song had ended, you returned them to where they belonged and re-entered the studio to pack away your things. You paused halfway across the room, noticing something laying on top of the wet canvas. You hastily closed the remaining distance, snatching the objects from the canvas to take in the damage they’d done to the wet paint. You were confused to find that, although still drying, each stroke was exactly as you’d intended it, still perfect and lifelike. You were even more perplexed when you took in the offending objects that you gripped in your palm.

A tiny posy of a couple of hydrangeas and peonies, exactly like the ones you’d depicted on the canvas, were clutched in your fist. You held them up, examining them from each angle, finding no unsightly brown spot or torn petal. They were truly beautiful.

Your eyes flickered from your painting to the posy, taking in their remarkable resemblance to one another.

Another one of the students in your class must have seen what you were working on as they left, and brought you the flowers as encouragement. You had several good friends in the class, and your art friends were always the ones to go above and beyond with sweet gestures. You made a mental note to question suspects the next day. It was such a kind deed, you’d have to do something to thank them.

You carefully placed the flowers on the desk as you put the canvas somewhere it could dry and where your teacher would notice it. You were excited to hear his comments on the piece, sure that he, too, would not have expected you to be so proficient so soon. As you collected your laptop and bag you handled the posy of flowers with gentle care, excited to place them in a vase once you returned to your cluttered apartment. You lifted them to your nose and took in their fresh fragrance, revelling in such a lovely end to a mostly good day.

—

Your trip home was largely uneventful. The walk to the train station and the subsequent train ride home were never particularly exciting. The carriage was a little busier than you were used to due to your late departure from university and the weekday rush hour to return home in the evening, but you found a railing to hold on to and kept the flowers close to your chest in order to protect them from the elbows and shoulders and bags of the other passengers.

One thing that did stand out on the fifteen minute train ride was a boy down the end of the carriage. You weren’t close enough to really make out his features and there were many bodies obscuring your path to him, but you couldn’t help but notice his attractive profile.

Your stop arrived quickly and you wasted no time hurrying home, your stomach driving you to get to your fridge as soon as possible. Normally you would cook yourself a proper meal, with some form of meat and vegetables, but that evening you were largely preoccupied by the attractive stranger on the train. You quickly poured yourself a bowl of nondescript cereal and made a beeline for your home studio. It was meant to be a guest bedroom, but you’d filled it with easels and a large desk instead of a bed and wardrobe.

As you awkwardly shovelled bland mouthfuls into your mouth with your non-dominant hand, you doodled cartoony sketches of an attractive boy. It was not the stranger from the train, although you did take inspiration from the nice curve of said stranger’s nose, but rather an original character. You didn’t pay any real mind to the fictional boy’s personality, simply doodling a couple of different facial aspects before trying your hand at a full body piece. You had almost no experience drawing people and knew nothing about proper anatomy, but once again you found your hand moving quite easily on its own, as if it knew what you were trying to do and exactly how to properly execute it. The tiny cartoons turned out well, the little figure immediately endearing himself to you.

But you didn’t want to just stop there. You were itching to continue painting, grabbing out your oils and setting up one of the largest canvases you had. You were determined, for whatever reason, to recreate your cartoon boy in realism. You weren’t sure where the absurd notion that you could successfully accomplish such an endeavour came from, but little would be able to stop you once you’d decided to start and seen what you wanted to achieve inside your mind.

Again, your knowledge of realistic anatomy was slim to none, but you had blind faith in the brush pinched between your fingertips and the ring that fell heavy against your clavicle. You alternated between sitting and standing in front of the sizeable canvas, paying no mind to the moon that was steadily travelling across the sky outside your window. Your playlist had long since finished and the sun was beginning to heft itself above the horizon when you eventually set your brush down. You scrambled away from the painting where it leant precariously against the leg of your work bench. It refused to fit onto any of the easels you had due to its size. Although you hadn’t slept a second all night, you couldn’t find it within you to be tired.

Instead, you had once again impressed yourself. The image before you of a boy with dark, fluffy hair parted down the centre, a fringe dusted to either side to reveal dark eyes crinkled in a smile, that lovely curve to his nose and pink lips stretched in a happy gesture that lifted his already high cheekbones, was undoubtedly life like. You couldn’t believe that it had been your hand that had produced it. You didn’t know you were so capable.

To finish, you grabbed your expensive silver paint and added a series of little earrings decorating his right ear. You had always been a sucker for a guy with piercings.

Sleep still did not call you, but food certainly did. Your stomach was protesting aggressively at its lack of sustenance, and you decided to obey, the idea of two minute noodles greatly appealing to you.

You departed the studio to scavenge for the miraculous cup of MSG and trans fat in your tiny, cramped kitchen. It had only been however long it took you to find the cup, boil water and pour the water over the noodles before a distressing thump echoed from your studio.

You froze with noodles and chopsticks in hand, your eyes flickering over to the door. Panic surged through your chest when you considered maybe the wet canvas had fallen over, but another several thumps banished that theory, replacing it with that of ‘there’s a fucking robber in my shitty apartment what could they possibly want to steal what do I do oh god.’

Before you could actually go through a rational thought process, you found yourself progressing towards the room with a wooden spoon in one hand and your cup of boiling noodles in the other.

You shoved the door open with all the bravery and force that you had in your body, expecting to see almost anything other than what actually greeted your eyes.

Stood in the middle of the room, inspecting the doodles from the previous evening that were scattered across your workbench, was a remarkably familiar boy. His head snapped up at the sound of your entrance, eyes narrowing in on where you stood in the doorway, poised for a confrontation. It was those same dark eyes and the same curve to the nose and the same dark hair that were still looking at you from the giant canvas leant against the table leg, but now when the figure turned this way and that he revealed angles you hadn’t even thought about yet.

Forgoing your fear for confusion, you rushed closer to the equally disquieted figure, brazenly lifting your hand and tucking the dark strands of hair behind his right ear, revealing the same piercings that you’d decorated the image with barely five minutes ago.

The boy jolted away from your touch in surprise, eyes wide as he looked down at you.

“Who said you could touch?” His voice flowed naturally from his lips, shocking you all over again. This boy—this thing—could talk?

“Did you… did you come out of the canvas? Are you the painting?”

He quirked an eyebrow, “You should recognise somebody you created from scratch, Y/N.”

“How on earth do you know my name?”

“I know everything you know. Everything that’s inside your head, is inside mine.”

“What the fuck? You can read my thoughts?”

He scrunched up his nose, whether it was at the notion or your language, you couldn’t tell, “No, stupid. I have all of your knowledge up until the point that I… materialised? Would materialised be the right word?”

“Do I look like I have any idea what’s going on here?”

“No, you don’t,” he admitted, “so, by extension, I’m also clueless.”

“What the fuck.”

“You said that already.”

You placed your wooden spoon down on the workbench and shot him a withering look, “Shut up—what’s your name?”

He blinked at you, before glancing around the room until his eyes landed on a cluster of dirty paintbrushes in a cup by your semi-dried paint palette. He quickly counted them, before turning back to you.

“Ten.”

You stared at him blankly for a moment, before pointing to the paintbrushes. “Did you honestly just do that?”

“Yes.”

“Fine,” you muttered, warily taking a couple of steps back from him, “just remember that was your decision.”

You couldn’t decide if Ten was a stranger or not. You had created him, and he claimed to know you just as well as you knew yourself, and you had spent the better part of the last twelve hours painting every freckle and hair on his body, but you couldn’t immediately shake the obscurity of the situation.

“You’re a painting?” You attempted to clarify once more.

“Well, I was, but I’m quite real right now. Do I smell food? I’m starving. I haven’t eaten in forever.”

You frowned in distaste at his joke, before tentatively holding your cup noodles out to him.

“You can eat?”

“Don’t all people?”

“You’re not a person.”

“My anatomy would beg to differ.”

“I wouldn’t bank on that,” you rebuked, leaning against the wall in a desperate attempt to steady your slightly shaking body, “my knowledge of anatomy is pretty shit.”

He ignored your doubts, taking the styrofoam container and wooden chopsticks from your hands and seating himself at your workbench. You watched him in awe. You had been expecting some of that childlike clumsiness kids always had to overcome when they first wrangled chopsticks, but he pinched them between his fingers as if he’d been doing it for twenty years and not two minutes.

You closed your eyes and took a deep breath, wondering if it was your lack of sleep that had you hallucinating. You reopened your eyes to find Ten watching you already with noodles dangling from his lips, wearing an expectant expression.

“What?” You asked irritably.

“I was going to ask you that. Why do you look so stressed?”

You released a short bark of disbelieving laughter, “Because this entire situation is absurd and I’m three seconds away from putting it all down to a lack of sleep.”

He rolled his eyes, “It’s not a dream or whatever. I’m here, you may as well accept that.”

“What do I do with you now, then?” You asked, pushing off the wall and coming over to lean against the workbench opposite from him, mostly to get a better look at him. He was entirely realistic, down to the pores and eyebrow hairs and long eyelashes that rimmed his dark but undeniably friendly eyes.

He shrugged and shovelled another mouthful of noodles between his waiting lips, “I dunno, keep me? Feed me? Love me?”

“If by ‘love you’ you mean interact with you as little as possible until I figure out what the fuck is going on, then sure, that too.”

Ten shot you a wry smile and propped his elbows on the table, gesturing in your direction with his chopsticks, “You’re forgetting that I know how you work. I may not be inside your head anymore, but I know plenty well that you’re not that much of an asshole. An impulsive dumbass, but not an asshole.”

“Who on earth are you calling an impulsive dumbass?” You shrieked in indignation, snatching your noodles away from him in a petty gesture.

“No, don’t. I’m still really hungry.”

“You should have thought about that before you were an impulsive dumbass, right? Another word and I’ll send you back into that canvas.”

“You don’t even know how I got here in the first place, let alone how to put me back.”

“That’s beside the point.”

—

Unfortunately, due to his origin (inside your head), Ten had been not only gifted with a dazzling smile, but also the uncanny capacity to irritate you. With the knowledge of the exact location of every single one of the buttons he needed to press to get a reaction from you, he took to driving you insane as if it were his sole purpose.

Over the next week, the bickering was relentless. Your only moments of peace were those spent at university whilst Ten stayed in your apartment, filling his time with the books on your shelves. It had surprised you, how much he loved reading. His personality was constantly amazing you, actually. Although you had come up with the outer layer of his being, you had never put any thought into his character, thus it had generated itself. Although he had developed some nice traits, most of the time you wished you had sketched it out so that you could erase all he aspects that drove you spare.

The first day, it had been hard resisting the urge to punch him in the face.

“Oh my god, I haven’t watched TV in forever!”

“I’m parched, I haven’t had a glass of water in forever!”

“I haven’t heard this song in forever!”

“Are you aware of how obnoxious you are, Ten?”

“Yeah.”

It had been even more of a battle convincing him that he would be taking the couch.

“You have a double bed, why are you so selfish?”

“Because it’s my bed that I paid for. When you contribute money to the running of this apartment, I’ll consider giving you half the bed.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“That sounds like a problem that doesn’t concern me.”

Cooking was also a challenge, every meal almost spiralling into homicide.

“Can you pass me the frozen peas from the freezer, Ten?”

“Do I look like your servant? Will you pay me? Woah, no need to point the knife.”

You steadied your nerves and ignored him, only to have a peach that should have been in your fruit bowl shoved in your face.

“You’re a peach of shit,” Ten produced, smiling proudly. In that moment, you were honestly quite sure that the only reason you were letting him stay was because he literally was a work of art—your art. It would be like decapitating your own baby.

And although his presence was undoubtably trying most of the time, (“Are you trying to pick a fight?” “I didn’t even say anything, Ten, you dense fucker.” “You were looking at me funny. Anyway, why would you call me a dense fucker? Are you trying to pick a fight?”) you quickly found yourself getting used to him.

As the days morphed to weeks morphed to months, he became a part of your routine. You automatically cooked for two, omitting the cucumbers that he detested to vehemently, recorded the TV shows he liked, he cleaned your brushes if you’d fallen asleep in your studio in the middle of the night, he kept the apartment (relatively) clean, you introduced him to your friends as your ‘new roommate.’ He couldn’t do much without all of the paperwork that verified his identity in this world, but as long as you remembered to buy him books he was content.

The comfortable, gentle rhythm that the pair of you fell into made you forget that he was not like you and that you were meant to be figuring out where he came from. He just felt like a person that perfectly complemented your personality. Sure, his absolute ultimate pastime was pestering you witless, and because of that you frequently forgot that he knew you impeccably well.

It had been nearing the early hours of the morning, the moon more than halfway done with its nightly romp across the heavens. Ten had been reading on the couch when he noticed you hadn’t come out of your studio for an extended period of time, deciding to heft himself up and check on you.

He strode through the doorway to find you sat at your workbench, a pencil in one hand and your chin in the other, your eyes closed and your head lolling dangerously back and forth.

He couldn’t fight a small smile at the sight, but made sure to banish it from his face before stomping towards you, startling you from your siesta.

“What?” You snapped, irritable and still half asleep.

“Go to bed.”

“No, I’m not tired.”

“And I lived a normal childhood. C’mon, you need to sleep.”

“No, I need to finish these concept sketches.”

Ten sighed, wrapping his long fingers around your wrist and tugging you gently from your perch on the stool. “Y/N, I know how you get when you pull all nighters. No amount of caffeine in the world will make you pleasant to be around tomorrow if you don’t sleep.”

You tried to escape his admittedly quite delicate hold, swatting at his chest with drowsiness in your eyes. “You’re such an asshole,” you mumbled. By the time you’d reached the living room, you were already pulling against his hold, your body leaning towards your studio.

He let out a defeated sigh. “You’re not going to go to bed in your room, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Come here, then,” he grumbled, towing you over to the couch and lying down once more. You were barely awake enough to realise what he was doing until he’d already done it, yanking you down until you were sprawled on top of him, your cheek pressed against the dark material of his t-shirt. One arm curved around your torso, holding you against him as the other picked up his book once more, holding it aloft so that he could make out the words over your head. Maybe you should’ve rejected the embrace, or insulted him for good measure, by the sound of his heartbeat against your ear and the steady rise and fall of his chest and the intermittent sound of the edges of the pages scraping against skin as he turned them lulled you quickly to sleep, one arm reciprocating the huge and the other hanging from the couch. Ten couldn’t really breath very well with your comatose, dead weight on his chest, but the languid sound of your breathing and the warmth from your body and the knowledge that he’d succeeded in taking care of you after you had done so much for him had him disregarding the discomfort.

The feeling of content achievement after that evening (he’d carried you to bed and tucked you in like a pro) had him going out of his way not only to irritate you at any possible opportunity, but also to look after you.

“Have you eaten?”

“I’m not twelve, Ten, I can manage my own mealtimes just fine.”

“But have you?”

“Fuck off.” Needless to say you rarely let him.

His next real success story wasn’t until the summer lapsed into autumn and the biting chill of the wind came back with vengeance. The pair of you had been grocery shopping—you demanded he come even though he found it a chore because he ate more of what you bought than he did—and were walking the short distance back to the apartment when the wind gusted up around you and chilled you directly to the bone. You lifted your shoulders and braced against the assault, but your flimsy jumper did little to help you in the combat against the elements.

Ten, ever perceptive, noticed immediately, dropping the grocery bags and wrapping you in his bomber jacket. His arms remained in the sleeves, but he used the unzipped front to envelope you in a hug, firmly pressing your cold form to his firm chest. You were thankful for the shelter of the thick material, mostly because it hid your inflamed face from him.

“We can’t walk home like this, Ten.”

There was a pause, before he stepped back and retrieved the grocery bags, bouncing up and down on the spot. “Fine then,” he said, a mischievous glint in his eye, “I’ll race you home, then.”

It took you a moment to take in what he’d said, and by that point he had a considerable head start down the street. You bolted after him, the grocery bags in each hand making the entire effort difficult, but the physical exertion and the sound of your laughter mingling with his in the frigid air warmed you quickly.

By the time the pair of you arrived home, you were both panting and red in the cheeks and removing jackets and excess layers to cool your bodies down. After putting away the groceries and checking you didn’t need his help, Ten retired to the couch for a nap whilst you began to prepare dinner. Forty-five minutes and a culinary masterpiece later, he came waddling over to you, rubbing his eyes and raking his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair.

You felt his presence behind you, and waited for a sharp jab from his fingers or a comment on how gross the food looked, only to be exceedingly astonished when he dropped his chin on your shoulder, placing his hands on the counter on either side of you, effectively trapping you between his body and the kitchen bench.

“Smells really good,” he muttered in a hoarse voice directly next to your ear, his warm breath tickling the skin of your cheek.

Flustered embarrassment rocketed through your system, leaving you nonplussed as to what you should do. Before you could properly consider your options and make the correct decision, your hammering heart and flushed cheeks had you shrugging his chin from its perched and shoving yourself out of his grip and away from him.

You spun to look at him, but regretted your actions almost instantaneously. He stood with one hand still on the counter, a bewildered, wounded expression on his face as his eyes briefly met with yours before dropping to the floor.

“I’ll, uh… I’ll get out of your hair, then. I have to finish the book I’m reading anyway,” he made an excuse to escape back to the living room, the tension taking up all of the air in the room and leaving the pair of you to suffocate.

He went to move past you, but your body physically rejected the sight of him looking so anguished, your hand shooting out to grab hold of his wrist. He tried to shake your hold, but you were firm in your grip, halting him in his stride. Before he could protest again, you grabbed a fistful of his shirt in one hand and his neck in the other, bringing his lips to meet yours in a frenzied, sloppy, meaningful kiss.

Ten froze, hands dead by his side as your lips moved with undulating pressure against the softness of his own, before he finally came to his senses and wrapped his arms around you, cradling you close to him as he returned the emotions you were pouring into him through the melding of your mouths.

When you were satisfied that you had properly conveyed the emotions you couldn’t use words to explain, you sank back onto the flats of your feet, craning your neck back slightly to look up at his face. He kept you close, refusing the let you step backwards and instead nuzzling his face into the crook of your neck, pressing kisses from your collarbone to the juncture of your jaw and the soft skin below your ear. It was a warm, pleasant sensation that had you relaxing even further into his hold.

Eventually you had to untangle yourself to finish cooking so you could actually dine before midnight, Ten’s hands evidently reluctant to let you go.

“That was an interesting development,” he mused in a teasing tone as he came to lean on the bench beside you.

You were marginally too embarrassed to make direct eye contact with him, the ghost of his lips on yours still present, so you settled for nudging his hip with yours in an effort to appear admonishing.

He chuckled again. “To be honest, I didn’t expect you to take the initiative.”

“Obviously I had to, with you over there twiddling your thumbs.”

“I was afraid that if I made a move you’d deck me over the head.”

“Three weeks ago I probably would have.”

He gasped dramatically, a mocking hand flying to his chest, “Three weeks? We’ve wasted three weeks?”

“Ten—”

“Unacceptable,” he muttered, sweeping you into a bone-crushing hug and littering kisses all over your face.

You would never actually let him know, but the enthusiasm was mutual.

—

Fingers dusted up and down your side as you and Ten lay squished together on the couch. You were on uni break, thus Ten was taking advantage of the opportunity to attach himself to you hip.

The pair of you often ended up in that very same position; you pressed against his side, trying to catch up on sleep as he held a book aloft, eyes skimming the pages. You were drowsy but sleep was determined to evade you that afternoon, so you had resigned yourself to slipping your hand beneath his dark t-shirt and tracing patterns against the taut skin of his abdomen.

“If I paint you again, what’ll happen?” You pondered. He shifted slightly, the arm around you tugging you subconsciously closer.

“Dunno, try it and see.”

“No,” you shut him down, “I don’t want to risk having two of you.”

But the question had stimulated both of your curiosities. Since the night Ten had materialised, you’d mostly returned to your nature landscapes with the rare cartoon doodles scattered here and there. You were honestly too freaked out by your apparent abilities to try much else. But, as always, Ten was relentlessly persistent.

“Come on, we have to try it out. This is insane! What if you’re a witch?”

You quirked a dubious eyebrow in his direction, “A witch?”

“Perhaps not a witch, but I still think you should try and figure out your power.”

“I don’t want to call it a power.”

“What about superpower?”

“That’s the same, just worse.”

But you gave in, disappearing into your studio with an excited Ten in your wake.

“What should I try?”

“A fire-breathing dragon.”

You rolled you eyes and ignored him, casting your mind in search of inspiration. Then you recalled the posy of hydrangeas and peonies that you had thought were a gift was a thoughtful classmate, and your hand started moving with that autonomous assurance that you’d experienced when drawing the boy standing beside you.

It was a simple painting, realistic pansies in a glass vase, but they had the same feel as the previous works that had emerged into the real world.

After you had finished, Ten and you sat, waiting expectantly for the flowers to leap from the canvas to the real world. After fifteen long minutes of nothing, the pair of you were getting increasingly bored.

“I’m going to grab a Coke from the fridge,” Ten informed you, standing from his stool. You mimicked his motion.

“Yeah, I need a banana or something.”

The pair of you were out of the room for maybe three minutes at most, but when you returned, balanced on top of the flat canvas was the tiny vase of pansies.

Both of you rushed forwards, taking turns holding the vase and inspecting it from all angles.

You tried out several other things—a clean palette, a decorative plate, a shell—to test the parameters of this skill you unwittingly possessed. The rules you could gather from your series of experiments were that you had to leave the room for them to materialise and they had to be realistic and at least close to actual size.

Ten was a bundle of excitement, marvelling at each piece of art that become physical before his eyes, imploring you to ‘draw a puppy!’

“I’m not sure I should draw anything else that’s actually living,” you said, reluctance evident in your voice. “Then I’d have to take care of it. Like how I have to take care of you.”

“Excuse me,” he replied indignantly, rounding the workbench and wrapping one arm around your neck, ruffling your hair with the other, “I am a blessing.”

“A blessing in disguise as a thorn in my side.”

You wriggled in his hold, laughing as you tried to retaliate with tickling fingers, when his hand caught the ring dangling from your neck.

“What’s this?” He inquired, turning the circular metal around in his fingers. It was a pretty plain band, nothing overtly special about it.

“It’s my lucky ring,” you explained, unfastening the chain and passing it to him to inspect properly. “It helps me paint better. Dad gave it to me when I was little.”

“Really?” Ten said, experimentally slipping it onto one of his fingers. “It’s really warm.”

“Yeah, it generally is. Probably because it’s against my skin all the time.”

“No, Y/N, it’s, like, really warm. Unnaturally warm.”

You took the ring back and noticed the way that when your fingers first made contact with the metal it stung slightly at the thick pads of your skin. An idea sparked in your head.

“Can you hold onto it for a minute?” You asked, shoving the jewellery back into Ten’s hands and turning back to the large canvas you’d been experimenting all over. You started drawing a fish in a bowl of water, a simple design that was quick to execute. Or at least it should have been. Sure, it still turned out well, but the strokes were not as easy as they had been half an hour ago. Maybe it was just your mind playing with your expectations, but you didn’t think so.

Ten watched on silently, not questioning your harried motions, simply rolling the ring back and forth across his palm as he waited to see the fruits of your efforts.

When you’d finished, the pair of your shuffled out of the room to wait for a few minutes. “Can I ask?” Ten wondered.

“Just wait a minute.”

He eyed you curiously as you bounced on the spot, impatiently checking the time on your phone, waiting for two minutes to pass.

When the clock indicated it was time, you barged back into the room to find the fish and fishbowl still as 2D as you had left it.

Ten was understandably lost. “How did you know it wouldn’t work?” He demanded, placing his fingers to the canvas and retracting them quickly when the orange paint came away on his fingers.

“Don’t smudge it,” you warned him, taking the ring from where he still held it in his hand and slipping it loosely onto your finger. You picked up a paintbrush and fixed where Ten had removed some of the paint, perfecting the image with that familiar ease of before. After it was back to good, you herded Ten from the room once more. He was less quiet this time, bombarding you with questions about what the hell you were doing, but you blocked him out, intent on examining the ring in the palm of your hand. Sure, it was your lucky ring, but you’d never actually suspected that it was anything more than a placebo or a superstition, that it actually did have some sort of effect on you.

After another lifetime of two minutes, you barged back into the room, greeted by a fish swimming around in a clear fish bowl on your workbench.

Ten halted behind you, releasing a breath of air that disturbed the loose strands you had tucked behind your ears. “Woah.”

“It’s the ring,” you said, toying with the warm object, “It’s the ring that brings what I paint to life.”

There was a moment of silence as the pair of you tried to understand what that meant.

“Where’d you say you got it from, again?” He asked, one arm curling around your waist as he pressed his front against your back, peering over your shoulder at the metal circle that was apparently so much more.

“Dad,” you muttered, yanking your phone from your pocket and dealing your father. He picked up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Dad, you know the ring you gave me, and how I always said it was my lucky charm? How It made me paint better?”

“Y/N?” Your father’s voice crackled down the phone, “How are you?”

“Dad, please,” your voice was bordering on frenzied as you tried to make sense of the situation, “you remember the ring?”

“Of course. It’s a family heirloom. Your grandfather gave it to me. I hope you haven’t lost it.”

“I was right,” you ignored his chastising tone, “it really does make my painting better. It brings them to life.”

Your father scoffed down the line, “I’m glad you’re able to make your art realistic, but I’m sure that’s down to your own talent, Y/N, not some old ring.”

“No, dad. Like, to life. Real. Physical. Can touch.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his tone darkened, “you sound just as absurd as your grandfather.”

“Grandad said the same thing?” You asked, unable to stop the excitement from creeping into your voice.

“Yes, I remember him saying the same thing when I was little. When he passed it onto me, he told me to be careful with it, but never to draw whilst wearing it. That was never a problem for me, you know how I’m awful with those fine motor skills.”

You were hardly listening anymore, “Thanks dad, I’ve got to go.”

“Y/N—”

You hung up, quickly redialling the number of your grandfather’s home phone. Ten was watching on in enraptured silence, trying to keep up.

“Hello?” Your grandfather’s voice was the one meeting your ear down the line this time, serene and gruff as any old man’s would be.

“Grandad, it’s Y/N. I’m calling about a ring that you gave to dad.”

This time the gruff voice was far more guarded, “What about the ring?”

“Dad gave it to me ages ago, but I think I’ve only recently discovered what it can really do?”

There was a weighty pause, before your grandfather spoke again. “You mean, you’ve created something real with it?”

“Yes!” You voice came out in a rushed, relieved breath. At least somebody knew what was going on. “Yes. I’ve been testing it out and—”

“Y/N,” he cut you off abruptly, “remove the ring and don’t pick up another paint brush. I’ll be over soon. You still live in that apartment near the university?”

You weren’t sure what to make of his suddenly frantic tone. “Yeah, I do.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“Ok.”

It took him the better part of half an hour to turn up at your door, clothed in brown straight leg pants and a neatly buttoned down shirt and jacket from three decades ago that distinguished his age, but the vivid expression of concern on his face made him appear younger and livelier.

“Y/N,” he greeted you as he barged through the doorway, eyes flickering around your normal apartment, “you’re ok?”

You were more than a little confused by his worry, “Yeah…of course I am.”

“Hi, sir,” Ten said, stepping out from behind you and extending a hand in a polite gesture. “I’m Ten.”

“Are you Y/N’s roommate?”

“Yes,” he nodded, “and her boyfriend.”

Your grandfather seemed to momentarily forget his panic, raising an eyebrow as you. “Boyfriend? For how long?”

“Maybe a month, sir?”

“Grandad,” you tried to reign the conversation back in, “the ring.”

“The ring,” he nodded, “what have you painted with it?”

You and Ten led him to your studio, showing him the canvas you’d been experimenting on. His bespectacled eyes flittered over the images, seemingly finding or not finding something that had him sighing in relief. “Thank god,” he mumbled.

You and Ten were hovering behind him, watching on curiously. “Thank god, what?”

“You haven’t bought to life anything sentient, apart from the goldfish. Thank god.”

Both you and Ten froze, your gazes automatically flickering to the huge canvas off the side that still displayed his origins. Your grandfather noticed your sudden change in behaviour, following your eyes to the painting. He looked back and forth between the canvas and the boy behind you, before taking a deep breath and opening his mouth.

“You mustn’t use the ring,” his voice boomed, causing both you and Ten to flinch away from him. “especially not to create real creatures.”

“Why?” You tried to level your wobbly voice, shaken by his sudden rage.

“Why? You foolish girl, they’re not real. They don’t understand the world we suddenly bring them into, they never learnt right from wrong. They’re inherently evil.”

You tried to reconcile his words with the warmth you could feel from where Ten stood close behind you, and found it impossible to believe. “Grandad—”

“They’re greedy, they manipulate you and your feelings because of course you love them, they’re a part of you! They take advantage of that,” your grandfather’s voice was raising steadily, his face going red as he spat out each word, “they’ll take over every part of you and devour your sanity! That one,” he pointed a wrinkled, wobbly finger at where Ten stood behind you, wide-eyed, “has already started. They don’t stop, they take every part of you until you’re nothing but a tool for all of these monstrous, beautiful creatures that you’ve created. They drain your bank account, your social life, your very life force dry. You mustn’t draw sentient beings!”

Before you could say anything in defence of Ten, your grandfather raised a loafer-covered foot and put it straight through the canvas adorning Ten’s image.

A garbled noise of shock scrambled from your throat at the sight of the torn fabric and tattered edges, but that was nothing compared to the wretched ‘oof’ that came from the boy behind you. You spun to seem him clutching his torso, doubled over in pain as if a foot had connected with his body. You swung around to where your grandfather stood, watching on expectantly.

“What did you do?” You were crying, your voice veiled by tears. You didn’t wait for a reply, simply turning back to where Ten sank to his knees. You fell to the floor in front of him, hands coming up to cradle his head to your chest as he began to shudder violently.

“No,” you murmured into his dark, soft hair, your body wracked with violent sobs. The single syllable fell from your lips repeatedly, a soft chant you knew would be of no use.

The boy in your arms began to flicker, his very form becoming incorporeal in your grasp. It was like a dying TV, the image blinking and stuttering before going to black. There was no gradual fade, no lingering sound of his laboured gasps or residual warmth. One second he was shuddering in your arms, the next he was gone.

Your arms fell limp at your side as you stared at the spot Ten had been moments before. You barely had a moment to try and take a breath into your lungs before a surprisingly firm hand grabbed your shoulder, violently spinning you around and glaring down at your distraught form.

“You are to never paint anything with a soul again. Flowers are fine, if you have to, and plates are nice, but you are to never create a living thing. They are nothing but evil.”

You saw no other way to get him to leave than to agree, so you nodded your head slowly, trying to prevent your lips from wobbling too obviously.

He, too, was shaking from the overexertion of the entire fiasco, but excused himself quickly, claiming he needed to get out of your ‘tainted apartment.’

As soon as you heard the decisive sound of your front door slamming shut, you leapt to your feet and scrabbled through your stacked, blank canvases for one of a similar size to the now ruined image. You set it up against the leg of your workbench as you had done before, gathering all of you materials around you and picking up a pencil to begin the initial sketch. You almost forget to retrieve the ‘cursed’ ring from the draw of the workbench, fastening its familiar warmth around you neck.

It took you several minutes to compose yourself and ease your crying enough to steadily hold the pencil, but with the aid of the ring and the vivid memories of Ten that kept circling in your head, your hand moved with gratifying ease.

The entire process was laden with intense apprehension. Even though this image looked even more like him than the first had, with the little freckle beneath his jaw visible as he threw his head back in the gleeful laughter you had come to adore so much, you were terrified that this wouldn’t work, that the person that would step from the canvas wouldn’t be Ten. You spent extra time pouring every part of his character into each line of pencil and each stroke of paint, smearing the pigment across your own skin as you wiped the streams of salty tears from your cheeks.

You finished the painting after an indefinite amount of time in front of the easel. The sky was dark once more outside the apartment windows, but you couldn’t quite remember what time you had started your frantic painting. You had certainly finished it faster than you had finished the first with how deeply the image of Ten was ingrained in your mind, the resulting work so entirely Ten that it was painful for you to look at.

The exhaustion hit you like a brutal punch to the face, and you gladly dragged yourself to bed. The exhaustion and despair and acute anxiety that was plaguing your body and mind enough to have you welcoming the comforts of your bed, even if the expanse of duvet and linen was far colder without the extra body next to you. You could still feel the tears staining your skin, but you were too tired and too apathetic to wipe them away, instead yielding yourself to a peaceful black.

—

You woke to pale light washing over your bedroom and a gentle hand on your shoulder.

Your bleary eyes, swollen from tears and sleep, struggled to focus on the face that was barely inches from your own. But when your brain finally made sense of the images your eyes were sending it, you found your body involuntarily lurched towards the figure, arms flinging themselves around his neck and tugging him onto your bed.

The chuckle that came from his throat was that heart-warmingly familiar timbre that had tears erupting from their ducts, but this time in unadulterated glee. You pulled back, clasping his face between your hands and rubbing your thumbs over his cheekbones and eyelids.

“It’s really you, right?” You managed to say through your breathlessness, heart clenching aggressively in your chest as you examined his every feature. His eyes crinkled at the sides as his pink lips curled into a well-known grin, exposing his perfect teeth and soothing your worries.

One of his hands came up to smooth your hair, the other stroking delicately at your puffy eyes, “Yeah, it’s me.”

An ugly sob of pleasure burbled past your lips as you pressed your forehead against his. Carefully, he manoeuvred his body around yours, climbing over you and sliding underneath the covers to slide his arms around you body and cradle you close to his warm chest, throwing a leg over yours and nuzzling his face into your hair. You could feel his lips pressing affectionate kisses to the top of your head as he held your still crying form close.

“I thought,” you mumbled, your voice still diluted by your happy tears, “I thought I’d never see you again.”

He released a gentle scoff and squeezed your body tightly, “Being with you…annoying you is my entire purpose. You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

Your hands came up to wrap around his arms where they held you, comforted by the physical touch, the feeling finally placating your fretting heart. “Thank god.”


End file.
